'The Americans' review: Spies are people too

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Updated 4:43 pm, Monday, January 28, 2013

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are married-withchildren Russian spies in "The Americans."

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are married-withchildren Russian spies in "The Americans."

Photo: Craig Blankenhorn, FX

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Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings in “The Americans.”

Keri Russell as Elizabeth Jennings in “The Americans.”

Photo: Craig Blankenhorn / Craig Blankenhorn / FX

'The Americans' review: Spies are people too

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The Americans: Dramatic series. 10 p.m. Wednesday on FX.

Do you miss the Cold War as much as Hollywood does? Probably not, but you have to admit, Soviets always made great villains in American films and TV shows. Even beyond the ruthless world-domination thing, those accents were ready-made for Hollywood. Nowadays, it's much more difficult to write a Russian villain, unless you make him a member of the Russian mob.

The Cold War may have ended, but just recalling films like "The Hunt for Red October," "Red Dawn" and "WarGames" brings a certain nostalgia for the cold old days. Even "Rocky IV" scored points by putting Rocky Balboa in the ring with a Soviet boxer.

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FX milks that nostalgia effectively with "The Americans," a new period drama premiering Wednesday about an attractive, young family who are anything but typical. To all appearances, they're almost boringly average: Mom Elizabeth (Keri Russell, "Felicity") and dad Philip (Matthew Rhys, "Brothers & Sisters") run a small travel agency and tend to their two kids, teenager Paige (Holly Taylor) and her younger brother, Henry (Keidrich Sellati). Dad plays iceless hockey with Henry in the driveway of their suburban Washington home, and Mom struggles with the reality that Paige is now a teenager.

But behind the facade, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are Soviet spies, sleeper agents carefully groomed in American ways and customs back in the U.S.S.R. to ferret out classified information and get it back to Moscow. Their marriage is the centerpiece of a carefully constructed arrangement of normalcy. The kids don't have a clue about their parents' real identities, but now that they are growing up, keeping the truth from them is becoming more difficult.

Set in Reagan era

The show, created by Joe Weisberg ("Falling Skies"), is set at the dawn of the Reagan era, when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were especially tense. Who knew, back then, that by the end of the decade, the Cold War would wind down so dramatically?

Of course, modern-day audiences know that the Berlin Wall fell, that Gorbachev spearheaded glasnost and perestroika, and that the passionate anticommunist Ronald Reagan would go from calling the pre-Gorbachev U.S.S.R. an "evil empire" to working with Gorbachev to end the Cold War. Far from being any kind of spoiler, that information only adds to our enjoyment of "The Americans" as we consider how the Jenningses' personal and professional lives might be affected by the evolution of U.S.-Soviet relations.

The Jenningses are brilliant spies - efficient, fearless, willing to do whatever is asked of them by their Soviet masters, including sleeping with contacts who can help them obtain top secret information. But then their perfect-suburban-world construct is threatened with the arrival of a new resident in their quiet suburban neighborhood, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent specifically assigned by his boss (Richard Thomas) to work with fellow agent Chris Amador (Maximiliano Hernandez) to find foreign spies in the U.S.

Despite the perfection of the Jenningses' front, Beeman is suspicious, which only adds to the pressure Philip and Elizabeth are already feeling about living their double life.

And that's where the show finds real dramatic depth: After years of posing as an American, Philip is beginning to find himself attracted by Western values and lifestyles. Elizabeth may not share her husband's doubts about Soviet life, but her years of playing wife and mother are beginning to take a different kind of toll on her. As a mom, she's dismayed in the second episode when Paige comes home from the mall with a new red bra. Paige just rolls her eyes and informs her mom that teenage girls are more free now than when Elizabeth was younger. Elizabeth privately gets the irony of that observation and, of course, so do we.

No intimacy

Then there's the marriage itself. Philip and Elizabeth procreated on command but otherwise share no intimacy once the bedroom door closes on their duplicitous daily lives. Is that facade beginning to crack as well?

In the second episode, the couple engineers an elaborate scheme to install a listening device in the home office of Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, with Philip sleeping with a sexy Washington trophy wife in the process. Elizabeth sees a photograph of the contact and tells Philip she never realized the woman was that attractive. It's said matter of factly, yet we can't help wondering if the pretense of marital intimacy may be giving way to real feelings on Elizabeth's part.

"The Americans" benefits from convincing performances by the cast, but Weisberg's concept and writing in the first two episodes make the show much more than "just" a spy thriller. While the series is already being compared to "Homeland," it also has something in common with USA's hit "Covert Affairs," whose central character, played by Piper Perabo, has to balance her manufactured identity as a Smithsonian Institution employee and her real job as a CIA agent.

Although we think of the Cold War era as much more white-hat/black-hat - or "red-hat" - Weisberg employs a post-Cold War view of how the Jenningses live and work in 1981. We don't think of them as bad guys or good guys - they are just people, trying to balance complicated demands in a morally complex world.

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